Taking sport too seriously

It's been more than 10 years since Andrew Flintoff was a consistently top-class cricketer, and he was only really a consistently top-class cricketer for about three years. Since then, he's become even more famous, a pretty solid mainstream TV presence, known beyond his original talent, while English cricket has gone through hundreds more ups and downs, twists and turns. Great careers have come and gone. Cook and Broad had not begun their test careers at the time of the 2005 Ashes, and James Anderson had barely started. That's how long ago it was that Flintoff was at his best. And hindsight tells us to look at Andrew Flintoff's test career, in the light of Broad, Anderson, Stokes, Ali, Kallis, Ashwin, Jadeja, Shakib, Swann and say ... hmm ... not totally sure what all the fuss was about. So what was all the fuss about? I first became aware of Flintoff in the summer of '97. He was captain of the England Under-19s and TV did a little feature on their "...

I feel duty-bound, if that’s the right word, to review the Ashes a little bit. I didn’t watch all that much of it, hopeful hours here and there, a few 3am wake-ups and some “highlights”. There was nothing all that unexpected, and England didn’t even play all the badly all the time. They probably had the better of about a quarter to a third of the days, just not the important ones. This is a poor England team, the worst since the 1990s, and actually they remind me a little of the West Indies in the same decade, with a couple of great batsmen and two great bowlers past their prime doing their best to hold it together, with wildly inconsistent results. I’m not sure England and the ECB are entirely the agents of their own downfall. There has been some bad luck along the way. There seems to be a desperate shortage of batting but the decline of Ian Bell was quicker than could have been expected, James Taylor’s career-ending illness a huge blow for a player who looked ever inch a tes...